Osama in Fishnets

The ”I’ll hunt down and kill America’s enemies” line was written for him and planted on his lips.

The ”It’s just a nuisance like prostitution” line is his, and how he really thinks of the issue.

What an odd analogy. Your average jihadist won’t take kindly to having his martyrdom operation compared with the decadent infidels’ sex industry, but the rest of us shouldn’t be that happy about it either. Kerry is correct in the sense that even if you dispatched every constable in the land to crack down on prostitution there’d still be some pox-ridden whore somewhere touting for business. But, on the other hand, applying the Kerry prostitute approach to terrorists would seem to leave rather a lot of them in place.

In Boston, where he served as a ”law enforcement person,” the Yellow Pages are full of lavish display ads for not-all-that-euphemistic ”escort services.” In other words, while you can make an argument for a ”managerial” approach to terrorism, the analogy with prostitution sounds more like an undeclared surrender.

This is aside from the basic defect of the argument: If some gal in your building is working as a prostitute, that’s a nuisance — condoms in the elevator, johns in the lobby; if Islamists seize the schoolhouse and kill your kids, even if it only happens once every couple of years, ”nuisance” doesn’t quite cover it.

And, as Kerry says, we’ve been here before: in the ’90s. Back then, every so often al-Qaida blew up some military housing, a ship, couple of embassies, etc., and the Bill Clinton team shrugged it off as a nuisance. No matter how flamboyantly Osama bin Laden sashayed down the sidewalk in his fishnets and mini-skirt he couldn’t catch the administration’s eye. In 2000, after 17 sailors were killed on the U.S.S. Cole, Defense Secretary Bill Cohen said the attack ”was not sufficiently provocative” to warrant a response.

So Osama tried again, on Sept. 11, 2001. And this time, like the escort ads in the Boston Yellow Pages, he was very provocative. And that’s the point: Even if you take the Kerry Doctrine as seriously as the New York Times does, the nuance of nuisance depends largely on the terrorists.

When all they could do was kill a few dozen here, a few hundred there, they were a ”nuisance” to Clinton, Cohen, Kerry and Co.; when they came up with a plan that killed thousands, they became something more than a nuisance. But that change in status was determined largely by them. The Kerry Doctrine leaves it in their hands. And, in this kind of conflict, if you’re not on the offensive, you’re losing.